WI Union Membership Plummets In Wake Of Worker Freedom Laws

There have been many lessons learned in Wisconsin's collective-bargaining reform era. Perhaps the most important takeaway is what has ever been true: When people are allowed the power to choose, they exercise that power.

The laws that have lifted the yoke of compulsory union membership off the backs of Wisconsin workers have empowered employees in the public and private sectors to walk away from big labor.

And they have done so in droves - even in the metropolitan area of the People's Republic of Madison, where the union membership rate has sunk to 5.4 percent.

Union membership has plummeted in the Badger State in the wake of the Act 10 and the right-to-work reforms led by Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican-controlled Legislature.

Act 10, passed and signed in 2011, broadly limited the power of public sector unions, returning control to the taxpayer. It also gave public sector unions the right to decide whether they wanted to continue to pay the union dues that they had so long been forced to contribute, or whether they wanted to remain in the union at all.

The legislation has saved the state over $5 billion since its implementation. More than $3 billion was saved thanks to modest contributions to benefits from public employees, and the reform saved the struggling Milwaukee Public Schools over $1 billion.

The right-to-work law followed four years later, giving private sector unionized workers the ability to opt-out of union membership. Wisconsin was the 25th stateto implement the worker liberty reform, joining a wave of six other states in the past 10 years that have passed similar freedoms.